Research Article Village-Indigenous Chicken Bacterial Carriage after the Heavy Rains of 2018, Kenya: Indicator on Environmental Contamination with Pathogenic/Zoonotic Bacteria Acsa Igizeneza , Lilly Caroline Bebora, Philip Njeru Nyaga, and Lucy Wanjiru Njagi College of Agriculture and Veterinary Sciences, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Department of Veterinary Pathology, Microbiology and Parasitology, University of Nairobi, P.O. Box: 29053-00625, Nairobi, Kenya Correspondence should be addressed to Acsa Igizeneza; parkacsa@gmail.com Received 29 June 2021; Revised 4 May 2022; Accepted 23 June 2022; Published 9 July 2022 Academic Editor: Daniel Diaz Copyright © 2022 Acsa Igizeneza et al. is is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Food borne diseases are one of the major human disease conditions worldwide. Most of them are of bacterial origin and chickens are a major source of such bacteria; they are consumed at high rate worldwide and tend to harbor the zoonotic bacteria without showing signs of illness. Running rain water tends to increase environmental contamination, since it carries various substances from one area to another; this results in village-indigenous chickens picking more bacteria from the environment as they roam/ scavenge around for food. us, after the rain, the chickens’ intestinal contents may contain more bacteria quantity-wise and type- wise. is study was carried-out to determine whether that was the case after heavy rains of 2018.120 intestine samples were collected from indigenous chickens from three slaughterhouses in Nairobi for bacterial quantification using the Miles and Misra technique; bacterial isolation and identification were carried out using standard bacteriological procedures. Intestines from the slaughterhouses had different mean bacterial counts: Kangemi had the highest (1.3 × 10 12 colony-forming units per ml), followed by Burma (5.6 × 10 11 ), then Kariokor (4.7 × 10 11 ). E. coli was the most isolated at 85.8%, followed by genera Staphylococcus (55%), Streptococcus (43.3%), Bacillus (41.66%), Listeria (38.3%), Proteus (24.16%), Klebsiella (7.5%), Campylobacter (2.5%), Pseudo- monas (6%), and Streptobacillus (0.83%). e study showed that the indigenous chickens carry a variety of bacteria in types and numbers, some of them being zoonotic. Apart from picking more bacteria as a result of environmental contamination during rainy season, the weather and bird-handling further stress the birds, thus contributing to higher bacterial multiplication and higher bacterial carriage. If slaughter is not done right, these intestinal bacteria can easily cause contamination of respective chicken meat; thus, if pathogenic, it can cause food poisoning to consumers of the meat. erefore, it is recommended that precaution be taken while slaughtering chickens for consumption. In addition, where possible, free-range indigenous chickens be confined during rainy seasons to reduce their exposure to contaminated environment. 1. Background Poultry population in Kenya contributes 30% of agricultural GDP (where 26% of overall GDP is from agriculture). Nairobi city is known to be the major destination of most poultry, particularly of indigenous types from other counties [1]. ese chickens are normally kept under free-range system of management in villages [2, 3] and serve as a source of protein to humans in the form of meat and eggs [4]. ey also have other diverse functions in the community [3, 5]. e traditional free-range system is the least capital intensive system requiring minimal financial input, hence affordable to even the resource-poor persons [2, 3]; they scavenge for their own feed with little or no supplementation. Just like other animals and humans, chickens carry bacteria in their guts [6, 7], reproductive systems [8, 9], and respiratory tracts [10, 11], mostly as normal flora. ese bacteria, which are nonpathogenic to the chickens, coexist and play an important role to their hosts, chickens [12–14]. Although they tend to occur as commensals in indige- nous chickens, some of the bacteria, for example: Escherichia coli, Campylobacter spp, Listeria spp, and Salmonella Hindawi Veterinary Medicine International Volume 2022, Article ID 5437171, 8 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/5437171